Earth to earth, sort of

In Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

“If this is dying then I don’t think much of it.’’

  -- Lytton Stratchey (1880-1932), English writer

I enjoy walking through most graveyards, of which New England has many beauties. Wandering around gorgeous garden cemeteries, such as  Swan Point, on the East Side of Providence, and Mt. Auburn, on the Watertown-Cambridge, Mass., line, can be soothing, even amidst the memento mori.  Actually, giving yourself frequent reminders of death can be healthy: It’s focusing!

But many  cemeteries are running out of space because people keep dying – very thoughtless of them. One of the challenges is that many families still want their loved ones’ corpses preserved  with chemicals and put into coffins in burial vaults or at least concrete-lined, which take up a lot of room for a very long time. I think that’s related to survivors’ varying levels of denial of death. There’s this (to me) weird idea that somehow preserving that organic, decaying thing called a dead body fends off the person’s annihilation. (I see the decay and disappearance of the body as simply its return to what we all came from – ultimately space dust. Call it recycling.) But I realize, as a former churchgoer, that Christians are told to believe in the resurrection of the body.

Cremation is much better than standard burials, though it requires burning natural gas. Take your loved ones’ ashes home with you in a bag and put them in a vase; they won’t mind. Then in a few or many years, someone will probably forget where that vase is, or even whose ashes are in it.

Then there are the environmentally admirable decisions to compost the remains or use hydrolysis to reduce remains to their elements. A gift to Nature. Yes, this goes against some folks’ feeling that the dead body still contains some supernatural life – a feeling that’s been very profitable for the funeral/burial industry.